Friday, April 15, 2016

SETTING THE SCHEDULE -- OVERTURE

By mid-May the broadcast networks will have
announced their plans for the 2016-17 season. In the good old days the upfront
presentations in New York were pretty simple. Here’s the schedule. Here’s some
backup. Here are some movies and specials. Here are the sporting events you
will want to be part of. See you at the bar.

Over the years things started to get a bit more
complicated. Broadcast networks, being part of something larger, started to
include their cable channels in the presentation. Digital platforms started to
become a factor in media buys. The concept of year round programming was
introduced where midseason shows were often placed in time periods to show the
advertiser that the networks were not going dark. As reality television grew
the summer became more of a factor. There were occasions where a Network
President would go through dramas, comedy and reality and then, as an
afterthought, put up a schedule. And, of course, delayed viewing needed to be
addressed.

This is not an easy business and it gets more
difficult every year. What hasn’t changed much over the thirty-five years that
I worked in broadcast television (research and scheduling) is the programming
cycle. For better or worse, before we see any evidence that the shows announced
in the upfront will succeed or fail, the development executives start getting
pilot pitches targeted for the next season. Scripts start to get ordered,
Agents pit networks against each other in bidding wars for the hot shows and
talent. By December and January decisions are made as to what scripts will go
to the pilot stage. Some shows are ordered straight to series. We blink and
it’s late April. We screen the pilots, hear the research and set another
schedule.

Sure there’s some off-cycle development but, to be
honest, that’s still the exception and not the rule. Toward the end of Kevin
Reilly’s tenure as President/Chairman of FBC Kevin sat in front of the TV press
and put up a tombstone with the words “PILOT SEASON” on it. I knew that meant
Kevin’s time was coming to an end. There are forces that want to keep the
process in place and I believe there is a rhythm to all this that has been
internalized by programming executives. There is an addiction to the process as
it is.

So, as the scheduler, how did I fit in to all of
this? Well, depending on who my boss was at the moment, I would try to
articulate a strategy based on what I felt our short term and long term program
needs were going to be. I would often be given the scripts of the final contenders
to read and I would offer my opinion for what it was worth. I would also be
communicating with the various constituencies (Sales, Marketing, Network
Distribution, Press and Publicity) to understand what their issues would be
come May. Depending on who the development executives were at the moment I
would be offered rough cuts of the pilots to help me start figuring out a
schedule.

All this would lead up to Pilot weeks which
generally spanned the end of April through early May. At both FOX and, before
that NBC, these two weeks were my show. I don’t know how it worked at the other
networks but the responsibility for gathering the participants, figuring out
how and what to screen, deciding how and when to present the program testing
(at FOX both research and scheduling reported to me) and who would be in the
scheduling room were all produced by the scheduling department in consultation
with the head of the network.

Putting together a schedule is a lot like
childbirth. No two births are alike and every year the scheduling process was
different. There were the easy years and there were the disasters. Some years
we would make the decisions, hug, high five each other and merrily fly off to
NYC. There were other years where there was a lot of venom. On one occasion, I
came home, packed and told the Masked Wife that I fully expected to be fired
when we returned from the upfront presentation.

With all the changes to the industry I have been
amazed at how seriously these two weeks are taken and you still see people go
up to the scheduling board (yes we still used a board while I was there) and
their hands would shake as they tried to articulate their recommendations for a
schedule. I grew a bit jaded about the whole thing as my years in the biz were
coming to an end. People would stop me in the hallways of FOX and ask if I was
excited about Pilot week. I would honestly tell them no.

For the last few years of my tenure at FOX I chose to screen the pilots
with the Script Club. They were the young assistants, and managers in
programming and other areas of the company. I did it for two reasons. I felt
that I could give them some perspective on the whole process. Talk to them about
strategy and which pilots might work on our schedule and why. I have always
been a teacher at heart. I also just needed to get away from everybody and all
the bullshit. I know people worked very hard to develop these pilots but I was
looking for an environment of honesty and I found it by hanging with the
“kids”.

By the time we got into the scheduling room I had a pretty good idea as
to where we would wind up. We had internal input on the pilots, we had the
testing, and I had been talking and listening to all the constituencies. It
wasn’t necessarily the schedule I wanted but rather the schedule that would
service the many interests within the company with Sales the most important
voice (in my opinion).

I would be asked to put up a schedule to get the
conversation going. I would go up to the board put up the schedule and give it
my best pitch. I would sit down and “go away”. How can that be the schedule?
We’re going to have to talk about it for three days. I remember at least once
when someone was talking to me while I was “away” and my pal Melva Benoit who
ran research said “Oh he’s not here”.

Well now that I’m really away, I thought that it
would be a good time to share with you all tales of my 27 years of Pilot Weeks.
I’ll break it into tales of the screening process, fun stories of pilot testing
and research presentations and give you a peek behind the curtain of the
scheduling process. Hopefully, as the networks announce their schedules, these
stories will give you some perspective. Maybe you will also have some
appreciation as to just how difficult these jobs can be.

These are my recollections and in no way should this
be taken as how things have worked at the other shops, nor how it will be at
FOX this year. However, there may be some nodding of heads if anyone actually
reads this.